To achieve business goals, most companies and institution have predefined business processes which have to be followed by the employees. These processes are designed in a way to be carried out which reaches the defined goals in an efficient way, thus adherence to these processes is vital to the companies' efficiency. Unfortunately, monitoring and analyzing processes and checking for irregularities can be time consuming and complex. To overcome this, process mining systems help to analyze the as-is processes.
Most tasks which are reflecting steps on the way of the process are conducted in an IT driven environment and leave traces in an IT system. Picking up these traces and reconstructing the as-is process from this data is the goal of process mining.
From a business process perspective a process involves the following process components:                A processed element which is passing through the process. Examples are an invoice which has to be cleared or a patient who has to be treated in a hospital.        Process steps which are conducted with the process element. Examples would be “Invoice is received” or “Registration of the patient in the emergency room.”        An order of process steps which are conducted with the process element. Examples would be that in a patient treatment process the patient is first treated before the bill is sent to the insurance company.        
In order to reconstruct the as-is processes by process mining systems at least one event log has to be provided to the process mining systems. Unfortunately almost no IT-system is prepared in a way that such an event log can be retrieved immediately from the raw data comprising the traces of executed processes. With such an event log the technical requirements are fulfilled to apply process mining techniques.
To address business process questions, the technical representation as an event log combined with process mining techniques at its own is mostly not sufficient for an end user in the role of a business process professional. Such a user requires a non-technical approach a process mining system with prepared analyses based on both event log and adjacent tables/files which contain process information.